Rebecca Jennings

Biography

Director of Deaf and Hard of Hearing Services/Associate Director, Office of Access and Services for Individuals with Disabilities at Teachers College, Columbia University. Sign Language Interpreter for the past 15 years in monologic and dialogic settings, primarily corporate and higher educational environments. An uninitiated member of the Open Source arena, but looking forward to soaking in all I can.

Sessions for this user

While the increased use of technology has in some ways improved the lives of those with disabilities, there is a gap that still needs to be filled. Uncaptioned or poorly captioned videos leave the deaf and hard of hearing community out of the loop, untagged photos leave blind users unaware of integral information, and poorly coded webpages are too much of a hassle for individuals using screen readers.
But what if this was this was different? What if we thought about all of the potential users of our technology and developed programs intentionally allowing access for everyone? How could we make a programmer’s work truly inclusive, truly open to everyone?
Experiential learning often provides those ‘a ha!’ moments, so together we’ll enjoy some mis-captioned videos, have a ‘listen-along’ to what a screen reader sounds like when a page is not coded correctly, and take a look at the end users’ experience when software is not programmed with a disabled audience in mind. Then, we’ll talk about what we can do to improve the current offerings and answer, “what next?”